Western Digital 45GB Firewire HD
Company: Western Digital
Estimated Price: $379.99
http://www.wdc.com
An external hard drive is a very handy piece of equipment to own. You can move it between more than one machine, you can save space inside your computer, and it takes almost no effort to install one. I am used to dealing with SCSI hard drives, with the always looming dread of a SCSI conflict or setting jumpers correctly. However, the Western Digital Firewire HD was a piece of cake.
Think about this: 45GB for LESS than $400! So, if you have a newer Macintosh with, say, an internal 10GB hard drive, you can, for under $800, add two of these Western Digital drives for a total capacity of almost 100GB.
The Western Digital drive is connected to your Mac or PC via the Firewire port, of which the drive itself has two. (Port A and Port B) Power for the drive comes from an included power pack plug, much like the same one on an Iomega Jazz drive. The drive also sports an on/off switch on the back of the case. You can use the second Firewire port on the drive to connect to yet another external drive, thus saving your computers Firewire ports.
Installation is simple. Run the installer from the included CD (it comes with both a Mac and PC CD-ROM installation disc) connect the unit to your computer, and restart. You do have to format the hard drive, but the installation program also installs a great controller Firewire Application called “FireWire Disk Control” which will make that a breeze.
This program will let you format, test, mount and unmount the disk. It is a very nice piece of software.
The Western Digital 45GB Firewire HD is not a fast drive, coming it at only 5400 RPM. This drive could not hold a torch to a fast SCSI drive, such as a 10,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah. However, a 38GB Cheetah drive would also require an Ultra160 SCSI card in your computer, and the Cheetah drive itself would run you right around $720.00. So while the the Western Digital 45GB Firewire drive may be slower, you could almost buy two of these drives for the same price as the Cheetah. However, if your doing work on your Mac where speed and reliability are more important than storage space, I would recommend the Cheetah.
The Western Digital 45GB Firewire is a well put together drive. It does not sport exceptionally impressive numbers, however. While the 45GB of storage space is great, as is the low price, seek/read times look less impressive. Western Digital’s website for the drive shows an average seek time of 9.5ms, which the Disk Control software verified on my test unit.
In real world usage, however, copying large files from the desktop to the Firewire drive felt pretty snappy, though nowhere close to the more expensive drives available. For the average home user looking to expand their storage space the speed probably won’t be an issue at all. But copy files over the network, I did notice that the drive felt much slower than if I was copying the same file to the internal HD on the same Mac. I also noticed that copying more than one file at a time to the Western Digital 45GB Firewire HD really bogged down the drive, whereas copying the same multiple files to the internal HD was much faster. I am not sure if this is a Firewire interface issue, or an issue with this drive and its 5400 RPM speed. (I tend to lean to the later)
All in all, the Western Digital 45GB Firewire HD is a fine addition for a home Mac user looking for more storage space, though digital professionals or network administrator will want to stay with WIDE SCSI fast drives.
MacMice Rating: 3.5 out of 5
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